by Keith Taylor
Hanging Loose Press 2006
Reviewed by Matt Soucy
Stick to the Prose
Keith Taylor’s new book Guilty at the Rapture is not a very exciting collection of verse. However, definitely worth a read are Taylor’s prose poems, which contain both good storytelling and the subtleties you might hope to find in any decent book of poetry.
The title poem tells of the relief Taylor would find at being left alone with the damned on Judgment Day. Taylor remembers himself as a young boy whose life was all misbehavior and guilt in an intense rural upbringing suffused with Christian values. The poem is humorous and unburdened, offering clear insight and solid “telling.” American Christian conservatism continues as the focus throughout the first set of poems.
Unfortunately, other than “Guilty at the Rapture,” the poem-poems don’t hold many kicks. Those that begin with promising intrigue and intelligence, such as, “The Stud: Galahad, Alberta, 1927,” tend to fall flat in their closing lines. Taylor seems to focus mostly on drawing pictures with his verse, but he makes the images too available to be of much use. In “Grandmother Triptych” he writes:
We remember her black dresses
shining like Bibles, her hand
moving lightly over our backs and arms…
Lines like these seem on the verge of some insight or image that would reframe everyone’s concept of something familiar—in this case, Grandma—in a new and sympathetic way. Unfortunately most of the poems do not go the distance.
After reminiscing about his Christian upbringing, Taylor introduces the prose poems. Anyone interested in the poetry world would probably thoroughly enjoy “First Reading.” In the piece, Taylor sneaks into a James Dickey reading and watches him sweat, swear, and offend almost everyone in the auditorium: “The nuns in the front row, who had been getting more and more agitated for half an hour, were obviously upset. Several left.”
Where Taylor’s verse lacks punch, “First Reading” steps in with a laugh-out-loud conclusion. With similar strength, the close of the short story/prose poem “A Foreign Language” is both meaningful and effective. Taylor adeptly closes with the human condition of holding singular, contradictory desires: “I didn’t want his mother to tell me that I had stayed too long in her rented garage. Most of all, I didn’t want her to tell me that I had left too early.” That Taylor’s prose can convey this unexpected duality highlights what is absent from his verse.
Thus I find myself wishing that later pieces of verse, like “Hitchhiking,” had been written in prose. Taylor’s efforts to tell stories in the more digested and concise format miss the mark almost every time. One exception is “My Education in Paris” which catalogues the women who turned Taylor down without his even propositioning them:
A young Persian woman whose name meant “little white
flower that grows in the desert” – at least that’s what she
told me and I wanted to believe her – said she wouldn’t
sleep with me because I was too old.I was 22 and I hadn’t asked her either.
A French woman I did ask said she was very pleased but she preferred women.
Wherever Taylor uses this self-effacing humor he makes an impressive connection to the reader that is personal and unpretentious, and is as memorable as his anecdotes in prose. Unfortunately, the bulk of his verse is not nearly vivid enough to stand out for either its observation or its construction.
*
Amy Beeder’s debut is promising, but she’d do well to lay off the flowers a little. A highly observational book of poetry, Burn the Field occasionally gropes for subject matter, but has a great deal of sophistication and many surprising lines. Beeder’s at her best when she submits to her most absurd impulses. In “Cabezon,” one of the book’s better poems, she watches a stranger “shuffle up Washington street” as she drives by: